Featured 7-17-2014: Highlights for High School

 

Highlights for High School is a companion website to MIT OpenCourseWare* providing open educational resources for high school educators and students.

 

Highlights for High School includes content created specifically for high school students as well as resources collected from the MIT curriculum that can be used effectively in high school.

 

Available resources cover not only science and math, but also engineering, humanities, and social sciences. The material can be integrated into classroom lesson plans, shared, reused, and remixed. Though meant primarily for juniors and seniors in high school, motivated younger students can also benefit from these courses.

 

 

The website is organized into two main sections:

• The Subjects section is arranged by topics likely to be encountered in high school, such as mathematics, physics, and biology. Within each of these you will find a variety of content, such as labs, courses, and video resources.
• The Exam Preparation section is aimed at students who are preparing to take AP exams in biology, calculus, chemistry, or physics. These materials are meant to supplement classroom learning. Relevant OCW course materials have been mapped to the topics in these exams and are easily searchable.

 In addition to YouTube access, Highlights for High School has posted all of their videos to TechTV, an MIT-based video service similar to YouTube.

 

*See yesterday’s post

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Featured 7-10-2014: MIT+K12 Videos

 

 

MIT+K12 Videos about STEM topics are made for students by students.

 

Current MIT students are invited and trained to write and host webisodes for kids about their favorite science, technology, engineering, and math topics, seeking to entertain and engage as well as to educate.

 

 

The mission of MIT+K12 Videos is to "use MIT's unique resources to inspire the inner scientist in all learners. We believe everyone can have wonder for our world - so we create fresh and authentic video content that entertains and engages just as much as it educates."

 

These videos strive to show science in a different light from what you might find in a textbook while making the assets that are distinct to MIT accessible to a global audience.

 

MIT+K12 Videos are hosted by MIT students who possess a diverse set of interests, personalities, and backgrounds and are relatable and fun. By training these students to become engaging advocates for science and producing these videos, the hope is to foster an enthusiastic and curious global community of learners and educators.

 

 Visit the MIT+K12 YouTube channel

 

The MIT+K12 Videos are free and accessible to anyone in the world.

 

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Featured 6-2-2014: Q?rius

 

Created for teens and tweens, Smithsonian's Q?rius (pronounced curious) is intended to help students make sense of the connections between nature, the planet, the universe, and their  everyday experiences.

 

 

Q?rius is an interactive and experimental "learning space" that capitalizes on the science, researchers, and collections assets of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History  Visitors are encouraged to be an active part of this energetic and fascinating community.

 

Through conversations with scientists and interactions with thousands of authentic specimens and objects, visitors will boost their understanding of the natural world, find new interests, and develop inquiry skills. Educators will come away with fresh ideas for engaging their students in science.

 

 

A Q?rius teacher account allows a teacher to create one account with multiple associated student sub-users. Teachers add student sub-users by providing a user name (not the student’s real name) which is associated with the teacher’s email address. No personal information is requested or collected about the students.

 

Student sub-users can create, save, and access a digital field book as part of the Create Your Own Field Book activity. Students can also post moderated comments to the Q?rius user community. Comments are only visible to other Q?rius users, and only by the user name provided. Sharing features, such as sharing content via social media services or email, are disabled for teacher accounts.

 

 

For student sub-users under 13, teachers are responsible for obtaining verifiable parental consent prior to registration. Teachers must retain this information for the duration of the school year in which they created the teacher account.

 

 Watch Q?rius - Question Everything - Discover More

 

Q?rius allow users to include media from Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo into their field books. The AddThis service is used to allow certain users to share content via social media services using their own user names and passwords for those social media service accounts.

 

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Plus 5-23-2014: Explain Everything

 

Explain Everything is an easy-to-use design, screencasting, and interactive whiteboard tool that lets you annotate, animate, narrate, import, and export almost anything to and from almost anywhere.

 

 

Use Explain Everything to create slides, draw in any color, add shapes, add text, and use a laser pointer. Rotate, move, scale, copy, paste, clone, and lock any object added to the stage.

 

You can also add new or existing photos and videos. Import many types of files from Evernote, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive,email, and more. Export MP4 video, PDF documents, YouTube video, or XPLX project files.

 

 

No account is necessary to use Explain Everything and share creations.

 

 See a video overview of Explain Everything

 

The iOS version requires an iPad running iOS 5.1.1 or higher. The Android version requires version 4.0.3 and up.

 

Note: There are some functional differences between the iOS and Android versions.

 

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Featured: 4-8-2014 Mobento

Mobento is a video learning platform that features a “spoken word” search. They believe they have invented a better, faster way to search.

 

A keyword search in Mobento will yield videos in which those keywords were spoken as well as the frequency of the words and the the precise location of the words in the video.

 

 

Mobento wants to help you manage the wealth of educational content and technology that can be overwhelming without proper tools. School Accounts are quick, easy, and affordable to set up. Intuitive and simple to use, School Accounts enable you to organize and secure video and other digital assets and deliver education that is efficiently used without online distraction.

 

Benefits for teachers:

• Powerful and flexible video learning system
• Simple to administer
• Manage users
• Easily create digital courses
• Build secure public/private libraries
• Attach documents and links to videos
• Control content and assure security

Students who have been raised on online video get a fast, engaging user experience. They can download or stream content and make Inline notes while viewing.

 

 

 Mobento offers free mobile apps for both Android and iOS that allow streaming and downloading, note-taking, favorites, watch lists, and device synching.

 Watch a video overview of Mobento

 

Mobento launched with only 200 videos, but that number has grown to well over 4000 currently, sourced from speakers at Stanford, Yale, Khan Academy, TED, and more.

 

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Featured 3-18-2014: Knowmia

Knowmia is a free, easy-to-use collection of video presentations and interactive assignments that can impact students both in and out of the classroom.

 

Knowmia is designed for education, without limits or ads. Knowmia's growing library of educational video content includes over 25,000 video lessons from teachers everywhere on a wide range of school subjects. Each lesson is tagged, making it easy to find.

 

Teachers can use the Knowmia library to share lessons with a wider audience as well as with their own students. Users can upload any video file. Because students have individual learning needs, Knowmia welcomes a variety of teaching styles.

 

The Assignment Wizard Tool is an easy-to-use, web-based tool that enable you to create assignments with video lessons, summary or instruction slides, and interactive questions. Each assignment can include a series of lessons that you create or find in the lesson library. Once you send out an assignment, assignment tracking provides real-time results with detailed reports on each student.

 

Free training for teachers shows you how to use the Knowmia tools to create and find engaging video lessons and share them with your students. Gather five or more interested teachers and schedule an online learning session.

 

 Watch an Introduction to Knowmia

 

 The Knowmia Teach iPad app is a free lesson planning and recording tool. It helps you create video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia  Import your own visuals, organize them in steps, and record your voice and face. You can record illustrations as you draw them and create animation sequences.

 

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Featured: 2-17-2014 myHistro

Create stories that are displayed on maps and geo-located interactive timelines with myHistro.

 

You can watch and read thousands of user-created timelines at myHistro or create your own dynamic timeline mashup with text, video, and images.

 

 

Combine maps and timelines seamlessly into unique presentations, convert any public timeline into a pdf file, or export it into Google Earth format (kml) for offline storage. Completed timelines can be embedded into blogs and websites for sharing.   

 

Features of myHistro:

• Archive with several hundred historical timelines to choose from.
• Collaboration tools, ideal for class activities.
• Secure content management.

Three privacy levels to choose from let you decide what others will see. You can keep your timeline private, make it public, or keep it between you and those you choose.

 

  

 View a slide presentation: myHistro Basic Guidelines For Teachers

 

There is an official free myHistro application for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch with simplified functionality. In this version you can create new accounts, add new stories, add new events, and manage existing stories and events.

 

Currently myHistro supports YouTube videos and pictures in JPEG and PNG formats. It does not require Flash.

 

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Featured: 2-6-2014 Glean

Glean has organized and structured the thousands of educational videos teachers post online every day. Browse through thousands of teachers’ videos, organized by topic, Common Core standard, and teaching style.

Glean uses technology designed to pick the ideal teacher for the student based on his/her learning style and ability.

 

 

The Glean team of teachers has watched the lessons, studying and collecting a number of details on every lesson like setting, pace, teaching style, grade level, and more.

Students can discover lessons by searching or browsing within a subject. Once a topic is chosen, the teachers within that topic are analyzed to find those who best match a student’s learning style.

 

Learners can ask questions of peers, teachers, and experts to get answers when they’re stuck.

 

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Featured: 1-14-2014 Nutmeg Education

Nutmeg Education is designed to give teachers an easy way to assess, track and improve student performance and build better Common Core assessments.

Create assessments with questions from Nutmeg Education's repository, or create your own questions. Pick from or create multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank or true/false questions. In the works are auto-generated questions and “interactive” questions, such as responding by clicking on a point in the coordinate plan.

The Live Resource Bank is a collection of Common Core aligned videos, games, and worksheets that can be attached to an assessment. The related Common Core standard appears to students below each question in their quiz results. All of the items in the bank come from free online websites and Open Education Resources  All are rated by teachers and sorted with the best, most-used resources at the top.

  

Students will be sent login details and “New Assessment” notifications via email. Students can take assessments with any web-connected device, or even with paper/pencil.

Students with access to an iOS device can use this free Nutmeg Education app to take your assessments. Students get immediate feedback and access to free tutorials and resources to improve.

 

 

Nutmeg Education supports learning by providing you with data and insights on students' Common Core understanding. 

 

Watch Nutmeg Education: Fostering a National Teacher Community

 

Early adopters will get Nutmeg Education completely free for one year. In a few months, new users will start to be charged for full access to the site.

 

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Featured: 1-13-2014 eduCanon

Build and share interactive video lessons using eduCanon. Students can now become actively involved in what has traditionally been a passive experience.

 

 

eduCanon makes it possible to take any YouTube, Vimeo, or TeacherTube video content and embed rich, dynamic questions with explanations inside the video. As students watch the video, the content is segmented into more palatable components to increase student engagement.

 

You can discover quality content by searching through the eduCanon database of teacher-created video, or you can paste the URL of a YouTube, Vimeo, or TeacherTube video, such as screencasts, Khan Academy, Minute Physics, TED, NOVA, etc.

Any aspect of the lesson can be easily edited, even after you’ve built it, from the title, to the video itself, to the questions, and when they appear. 

 

 Watch an overview of eduCanon's Builder Environment Walkthrough

 

eduCanon Monitoring analytics can inform you about whether students actually watch the video (key to flipping classrooms), what concepts they struggled with, and who really needs help. 

 

eduCanon is a free web-based app and works on all major browsers, Google Chrome and Safari are recommended, however. It supports iPad use as well.

 

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Featured: 1-8-2014 Big History on H2

The Big History series on H2* poses questions and mixes history and science to change the way people view history.

 

Big History takes familiar topics and, by weaving science into the core of history, examines them in new ways that will have you rethinking everything you thought you knew.

 

 

The series creates an interconnected view of things that links history to multiple fields such as astronomy, biology, chemistry, and geology.  The first season ends with a two-hour finale that pulls everything we know about science and history into one grand narrative.

 

 View Not Your Father’s History

 

New episodes of Big History run Saturdays at 10 pm EST (11 pm PST) on H2.

 

*H2 is a digital cable and satellite television network featuring historical and popular science documentaries as well as pseudo-scientific entertainment programs and is a sister network of History Channel. 

 

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Featured: 1-6-2014 Big History Project

The Big History Project is a free, open, online social studies curriculum designed for secondary schools (students aged 14+). 

 

Big history weaves 13.7 billion years of evidence and insights from science and history into a single, cohesive story. The Big History Project asks the big questions about our Universe, our planet, life, and humanity. Students can consider our future path and be challenged to develop the skills and knowledge they will need. 

 

 

The aim of the Big History Project is to help "students develop vital skills, knowledge, and a deep, enduring passion for learning."

 

Some features of the Big History Project:

• Materials that are easy to download, print, and share
• Lesson plans, inline teaching guidance, and support
• Custom content including videos, texts, comics, and animations
• Easily tailored to state standards and instructional approaches
• Aligned to Common Core ELA standards for 9th and 10th grades  

 Watch Big History Project: A Story for Everyone

 

 

The Big History Project is a joint effort between a group of dedicated teachers, schools, and supporters. Bill Gates is providing ongoing support to establish the Big History Project and make it free and publicly accessible. 

 

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